British caper-happy director Guy Ritchie recently sat down with MTV to talk about “Sherlock Holmes” and dished on the film’s “supposed” homoerotic elements.
“As a heterosexual couple that at moments could seem gay, they play it off very well. These guys are sort of in love with each other. It’s real mate-ship. It’s trying to keep that balance. You have to endear yourself to them, and at times you skate on thin ice because it’s such a relationship about two men. I’ve been accused of this underlying theme in my films on more than one occasion.” Ritchie said.
Deciding to get the bottom of this once and for all, Gawker snagged a copy of the March 18, 2008 draft of the script and scoured it for anything remotely gay, and only found an early scene in which Holmes appears to be miffed when Watson reveals he’s getting married [ed. we’d say it was more than just “slightly”]. Holmes says that marriage is for “ordinary people” of which he believes, they are not. Take that for whatever it means.
Even though producer Joel Silver claimed the film would be “like James Bond in 1891” (barf), our own look at the script (dated a few days before Gawker’s version) certainly points at something franchise ready, with the edges rounded off and eager to get asses in the seats. And while we detected nothing overtly gay from the script, in retrospect we can see how all the “gay” talk has bubbled up and it’s obvious that the filmmakers are clearly aware they’re playing with sexuality a little. Too much? Will it turn off the geek crowd or the family crowd that it’s supposedly aimed at?
Then again, if anyone can take even the most ordinary dialogue and turn it into a come on, it’s Robert Downey Jr., so we’ll just have to wait and see how he chews the scenery. It’s funny, when we posited the homoerotic overtones in ‘Holmes’ in a pretty cheeky piece a few months ago, based on a USA Today interview (yeah, this gay talk is nothing new), Jeff Wells picked it up, and the USA Today writer got mad at us and emailed us saying the quotes were taken out of context. Uhh, well Ritchie just said as much, so we think you owe us an apology now.
“Sherlock Holmes” comes out (ha ha) on Christmas Day.
